beyond heroism and tragedy, a deeper level of subversion

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	• Luigi Nono: Fragmente; Hay que caminar Luigi Nono, Arditti String Quartet Disques Montaigne, 2003 average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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tragedia d'ascolto

all of Nono's late creative phase can be explained by his disgust his sense that the vigours of modernity have eclipsed past out existence where the marketplace trashes/pilferes anything of value furthering the cause of meaning,or progression,so we then have the reduction of the aesthetic to the least common denominator as the minimliast cadre have revealed in countless un=expressions.This furthered within the popular avant-garde of digitalizations schemes, homogenizations of expression. If you don't see Nono's late oeuvre within this context well then he is simply another uninteresting elitist intellectual with Leftist affinities. But this quartet if it has any substance must comment and have some conceptual dialogue with what surrounds it, its "environment" as the marketing departments refer to. The late Nono phase actually began in the mid-Seventies with a "Nocturne" to Maurizio Pollini,a sketchlike work that finally concretized into the "sofferte onde serene", "serene waves endured"a gorgeous work, with beautiful tape metamorphosis of Pollini pre-recorded like a "mirror"a mist of the past for piano and magnetic tape. There you can find, if you a looking for it, the creative DNA for all that came after culminating in the grandiose multi-dimensional "Prometeo".
The Arditti is the most profound reading of this work as all Nono, and it is curious how this quartet really refuses to enter the global quartet repertoire.It has a resistance to popularizing itself, no commercial potential.Standing Quartets would rather entertain the predictable symbolic order with sports-like marathons of complete "Elliott Carter Evenings", ad nauseum. Adorno said this in the Fifties at his lectures at Darmstadt that the avant-garde had a tendency for the sports-like substance,of spectacle,surface,one-dimensions of all technique and no substance advanced; rather than (well for Adorno)pursuing the canons of modernity, commitment to materials and the musical subject, meaning realized,structural trajectories advanced, genres reinvented.
Nono's "Quartet" here still maintains these features with a "pulverized" like state, that the voice of modernity has been pilfered, made homeless, and placed in some exile. It is rather heroic of Nono to allow his work to function within this capacity, well he was a one-time Resistance fighter against the Nazis in Italy. But as other reviewers observe quite correctly, with Arditti you get the "irrational" at work, the incomplete, the existential, a leftover from the "buzz" of the Fifties, that really Nono was only marginally engaged. The result is a tension, and that is what will give this work its longevity, as long as it remains unresolved.

The violin antiphonal duet herein is also wonderful to experience,well wonderful like root-canal,something that will give benefits as some future point in your existence; with the Arditti cadre they comprehend the darknesses here un-dramatically. Nono though of this late phase as music with a sketchlike substnace, incomplete, and frequently one work "franchised" into the next, as all the solos and duets that found its pathways to or from "Prometeo" as this work. This is where this music should be. Gidon Kremer's reading, although he worked directly with Nono is too metropolitan, to conservative in approach,goal-bound to finding a meaning,even if it is wrong-headed not willing to take any risks in his music making. His humanity as well is questionable where(in a story from a friend) he refused to speak to a fellow-violinist who was unfortunatly driving him in his cab to Kremer's hotel.Alberman and Arditti make you feel and sense the distortions, the mis-shapened places of the work, with high harmonics, pencil-thin timbres, as the quartet.

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A turning point.

A turning point.

Luigi Nono's only quartet "Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima" is a turning point in the italian composer's career, that changed deeply after this notes, right in the limit of what we can hear, of what we can feel, of what we can think about.

Luigi Nono's thinking in the last decade of his life was very concerned about the silence, the perception of the music and the deep dialogue between composer, performers and the listeners as a central part of the musical fact. "Ascoltare", "to listen" was the key of Nono's musical philosophy in the eighties and Fragmente-Stille is the beginning of this period. Nono asks for an active listener who can makes interpretations of the music and who can make sense of the silences, a listener that take part in the construction of the meanings, a very dialogical way of understanding art and culture that create a very open works. It's not the concept of "Opera aperta", by Umberto Eco, but it's truth this works have meanings that can be very different in every listener's mind, specially if the attention and listening is "ears-open".

From the point of view of the technique, this Fragmente-Stille marks a new level of complexity in quite all the parameters of the music playing. The dynamics descends to unknown possibilities, the tonality goes into microtonality, the union of the work reach the "impossible", the silence is present explicit and implicit all the time in the work, the coordination between the players is exceptionally complex... All the new ways Fragmente-Stille shows will be developed in the next years in many of Nono's late works, like Prometeo, Hay que caminar, soñando, No hay caminos... even with the systematic use of computers for the sound's treatment. Anyway, we're not talking about a rupture in his career or a breaking point in western music, just a development of many of his ideas realized before, in works from the `60s and the `70s much more concerned about political questions. In those works many of the techniques here listened were present but in a different way, what we have here is a turning point, but not a new road. The own Nono in many of his texts talks about the very important necessity of listening the masters from the past, and the necessity of continuing a way which come from the very old tradition, in his case even from the medieval venetian masses, that have ideas really present in the own Prometeo, like the multifocused attention to diverse origin of music, another of Nono's central thinking, trying to create new ways of listening music apart from a very conservative direction orchestra to public.

"Hay que caminar, soñando" is Nono's last work, very close in style and conception to Fragmente-Stille, the work we saw opens a period. The violins playing and quite not audible in some moments and the work ask for an exemplar recording, that it's not exactly the case of this Montaigne recording, and I'm talking abaout technical aspects.

The performing is outstanding; I have Fragmente-Stille by the LaSalle String Quartet (DG) and I've listening the work live, and I can say it's quite impossible to make it better than the Arditti, as they control absolutely the technical playing and the presence of the notes and the silences. LaSalle's version is more pale and plane, not so modern like this; I know some people who think that this one by the Arditti it's too much modern, like a kind of Nono seen by Lachenmann, but I really enjoy it much more than any other version I know, over all if you listen it with no noises in the house, with a good Hi-Fi system and on the night if it could be.

Arditti and Alberman gave the world premiere of Hay que caminar, soñando, under Nono's supervision, and you can feel it in the very precise and correct understanding of the work. There is another very good version, played by Kremer and Grindenko (DG), but I really prefer this one.

The recording could be better, it's not the strong point of this CD, but it's enough to understand the work and to enjoy it, specially with no other noises when you go into this very personal and deep ways of the better human thinking.

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the pinnacle of 20th century chamber works.

agonizing silences, explosive gestures, phantasmagoric sonic qualities ... the abstract reconciliation of tragedy and triumph, conveyed in the arch-modernistic language of one of the 20th century's greatest avant-garde composers. Nono's only string quartet is a masterpiece.

beyond heroism and tragedy, a deeper level of subversion

Nono's only string quartet, "Fragments and Silence," ushered in Nono's "late period," when he moved toward a more subdued form of subversion, forcing listeners to listen intently, taking nothing for granted. As performed by the Arditti Quartet, the piece is startling -- sounds you have never heard before. Fragmented sounds regularly negated by silence, negated in turn by new sounds, reforming, turning, creating something new out of nothing, out of chaos...

In turning away from more overt politics, Nono can be seen as retreating, but he saw the works of his late period as more deeply radical, challenging the basic perceptions and assumptions of the commodified society. He effected a rapprochement with Boulez -- I wonder to what extent he realized that his '80s work moves toward the aesthetic position of his Darmstadt collaborators of the '50s who he had previously denounced for their apolitical stance?

"Hay que caminar" for two violins is also available on the recently re-released DG 20/21 Echo disc, performed by Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Gridenko. I prefer this original recording -- as I said in my review of the DG disc: "The Arditti/Alberman version has more silence, more extreme dynamics, and conveys a sense of being utterly, existentially lost. You might say it emphasizes that there is "no path," while [the Kremer/Gridenko version] emphasizes that nonetheless "we must walk."

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Luigi Nono's only score for string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima already expresses at the very beginning of the 1980s, with its ample phrases made up of fragments mingled with long-held notes and drawn-our silences, that "tragedy of listening" that haunts the composer's last works -- a world both crepuscular and ethereal, shot through with shadows and fleeting sensations, and a meditation on the "eternal silent brightness" of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin.